[Step 5] – Optimize – 6 Steps to Social Media Success

Optimization of your social media campaign is critical when spotting trends, identifying weaknesses and improving performance. Looking back over the content you’ve posted and analyzing clicks, comments, shares and mentions (amongst other metrics) will really start to give you a good idea of what content is resonating with your audience.

Important Facebook Insights

You will need to rack up 30 likes before you can gain access to Facebook insights for any fan page you have admin control. This number can be quickly built up by inviting your e-mail contacts or friends from your personal Facebook profile.

To view, click on the gear wheel on your Facebook Fan Page and select ‘View Insights’. You’ll see a graph like the one below.

This is the main Insights dashboard and here you’ll see the total number of likes (and whether this is increasing or decreasing), the number of friends of fans available (this is the potential number of people you can reach!), how many people are actively talking about your page as well as your total weekly reach.

Then below you will see a list of all your recent posts and related stats. To sort through your posts and find the ones that have the highest engagement, click on “engaged users” to sort from highest to lowest.

Engaged users means how many unique people have clicked on that post, then if you click on the number, a pie chart will appear with a breakdown of what actions were taken when users click the post.

The post with the highest number of clicks identifies what posts connected with your audience. Make sure you learn from this and keep giving them what they want!

You can also do this with the Virality column, this tells us the percentage of people that have created a story about the post in the news feed compared to the number of unique users who saw it. Indicating the most ‘shareable’ content.

As you may have already noticed, there are a ton of different features and analytics in the insights panel, I’m not going to go through all of them, but metrics like Reach and People Talking About are the most important.

Your reach will tell your how many unique people your posts are reaching and if any of your fans are actually sharing your content with their networks. People Talking About will tell you how many people have created a story in the news feed about your post or fan page over the past 7 days. When you see a positive trend in these 2 numbers your posts should be well suited to your audience.

A new metric is now available for real-time analytics on individual page posts. You can see how many people have seen the post, with a breakdown of organic or viral views. Organic views tells us that a fan has seen your post in their news feed, viral views tells us the amount of people (fans & non-fans) that have seen a story about your post. (see screen shot below)

Twitter & Hootsuite Analytics

Although Twitter doesn’t have a native analytics program like Facebook, Hootsuite does offer some useful metrics in the reporting section.

Make sure you use the Hootsuite link shortener when posting updates to track the clicks on each tweet you send out. Like Facebook, you can assess what tweets got the most clicks and determine what posts have been resonating with your audience.

I also use Klout to dig a little deeper into the activity for my Twitter accounts. The specific measure of Klout is quite useful in assessing your influence, but when starting your campaign this number won’t be particularly important. Klout does show you how many mentions and RT’s you have received over the previous 90 days.

These metrics will give you an indication of the virility of your tweets, the more RT’s and @mentions you receive, the more social your Twitter account will become. This is because when you receive a RT, your tweet get’s tweeted out to all the followers of the retweeter, further extending the reach of that tweet. @mentions provide evidence of relationship building and interaction with your followers and could be the start of a conversation that leads to a sale.

Google Analytics

One of your campaign goals may be to drive traffic back to your website where you can convert this traffic into a lead, therefore it’s important to analyze how much traffic is being referred from social sources.

If you have set up a goal using Google Analytics you will be able to track visitors from social sources right up until they become a lead or make a sale. You can find out how to set up a goal here.

How social referral traffic is performing for you most likely depends on two factors:

1. How interesting your content is; and

2. How easily shareable you have made that content across a variety of networks.

What you need to understand to improve is that friends encourage their friends to digest specific content. If you can appeal to a given person, their friends are statistically more likely to be interested in the same thing, so you’re likely reaching a well-targeted audience.

So if your content isn’t getting shared, then it’s time to try something different. Start by seeing what’s working with your competitors then find ways you can improve on what they are doing.